of Dumas. No such study have I to offer, in the brief
seasons of our perishable days. I own that I have not read, and do not,
in the circumstances, expect to read, all of Dumas, nor even the greater
part of his thousand volumes. We only dip a cup in that sparkling
spring, and drink, and go on,--we cannot hope to exhaust the fountain,
nor to carry away with us the well itself. It is but a word of gratitude
and delight that we can say to the heroic and indomitable master, only an
_ave_ of friendship that we can call across the bourne to the shade of
the Porthos of fiction. That his works (his best works) should be even
still more widely circulated than they are; that the young should read
them, and learn frankness, kindness, generosity--should esteem the tender
heart, and the gay, invincible wit; that the old should read them again,
and find forgetfulness of trouble, and taste the anodyne of dreams, that
is what we desire.

Dumas said of himself ("Memoires," v. 13) that when he was young he tried
several times to read forbidden books--books that are sold _sous le
manteau_. But he never got farther than the tenth page, in the

"scrofulous French novel
On gray paper with blunt type;"

he never made his way so far as

"the woful sixteenth print."

"I had, thank God, a natural sentiment of delicacy; and thus, out of my
six hundred volumes (in 1852) there are not four which the most
scrupulous mother may not give to her daughter." Much later, in 1864,
when the _Censure_ threatened one of his plays, he wrote to the Emperor:
"Of my twelve hundred volumes there is not one which a girl in our most
modest quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, may not be allowed to read."
The mothers of the Faubourg, and mothers in general, may not take Dumas
exactly at his word. There is a passage, for example, in the story of
Miladi ("Les Trois Mousquetaires") which a parent or guardian may well
think undesirable reading for youth. But compare it with the original
passage in the "Memoires" of D'Artagnan! It has passed through a medium,
as Dumas himself declared, of natural delicacy and good taste. His
enormous popularity, the widest in the world of letters, owes absolutely
nothing to prurience or curiosity. The air which he breathes is a
healthy air, is the open air; and that by his own choice, for he had
every temptation to seek another kind of vogue, and every opportunity.

Two anecdotes are told of Dumas' books, on